Well it’s Monday so here’s what will hopefully be the first of two reviews this week. We’re now all the way up to number
where we find
Echo Street --- Amplifier
I must be finally going mad, or else really getting it wrong, because I remember listening, after much encouragement and positive reviews, to “The Octopus” and hearing death growls, which immediately caused me to stop listening. And so when I kicked this up on the MP3 player and pressed play I expected to hear something I would be unlikely to enjoy. And yet, as it turned out, I was way off the mark. Whether Amplifier changed their sound for this album or whether I somehow got “The Octopus” confused with another one I don’t know, but there are no death growls on this album. Quite the contrary: it’s at times as laidback as you could imagine, which was a big and also pleasant surprise to me. This is Amplifier’s fourth album, and talking of surprises, I’m told they have no keyboard player, so that any sounds that seem like they’re synth-made are in fact made on the guitar.
“Matmos” gets us underway, and no I have no idea what it means, but it comes in very quietly and gradually, atmospheric sounds that you would be hard-pressed to believe are guitar-made leading us well into the first minute before proper guitar strums accompanied by
”Na-na-na-na-na-na” opens the song as vocalist Sel Balamir sings softly, the guitar still laconic and atmospheric, almost acoustic, keeping the musical background firm. I’m almost loathe to believe the next sound is on guitar because it sounds completely like keyboard, but that’s what I’m told. Percussion kicks in now, but the song is still very slow to mid-paced,nd a great start to an album I really thought I’d only be reviewing under duress.
It only has eight tracks, but the shortest is just under five minutes while the longest runs for over twelve, so it’s still decent value. There’s a definite sense, at least here, of the old folk and acoustic singers like Dylan, Gates, Young, Guthrie. The guitar gets harder and more powerful in the last two minutes, and both Balamir and Steve Durose handle fret duties, doing a great job between them. The song ends as it began, on single strummed guitar and takes us into “The wheel”, with buzzing, almost hypnotising rhythms, a start somewhat reminiscent of Floyd’s “Welcome to the machine” in places, and a great guitar motif running through it.
It’s a faster song, though not that much, and drummer Matt Brobin does much to lay down the identity of the track, pairing with Alexander Redhead on the bass. The guitar is sharper here, more in-your-face, though one of them keeps that spellbinding theme running --- again, I can’t believe it’s not keys but the evidence is there in the lineup --- while Balamir sings the lyric, and not a hint of growls, never mind death ones. What was I listening to when I thought it was “The Octopus”? Must check that out later. For now, this song slides into a really slick guitar solo as Brobin thrashes out the drumbeat, then it falls back a little in the fourth minute before the guitar motif returns to take it to the end and into the longest track, the twelve-minute “Extra vehicular”. This is a great track but I do notice certain themes and musical phrases recurring throughout the album. This has much of the melody of “Matmos” and is very similar to the next song, which I’ll talk about shortly.
A darker, more dramatic sort of song, it has a deep guitar intro that takes it into the second minute before the vocal comes in, and it’s slower, broodier than either of the two preceding tracks. Elements of Porcupine Tree and Floyd in it, with the guitars punching through into the song around the fifth minute or so, and they really get going in the sixth, and it’s pretty much extended guitar solo (or duet) time from there to the end of the song. It does seem a little dragged out though beyond the tenth minute, and I feel it could have faded down at that point but it stretches on for another two. When I see a song of this length, I always hope to see that the artiste has used up all the available time with music and/or singing and not just left extended noises and effects or even in some cases space just to fill the time. Here, it’s not quite that bad but the song definitely does not need to be this long. Nod to Peter Gabriel at the end with the sound effects that close “Lead a normal life”, but still.
My favourite track is up next, with as I say much of the melody both of “Matmos” and “Extra vehicular”. Nevertheless, “Where the river goes” is still far and away the standout on the album. Great jangly guitar, super hook and a great melody. When the guitars kick in properly it really lifts the song to another level, as do the vocal harmonies. It’s interesting too that there’s little or no percussion really until more than halfway through, with some intriguing guitar effects before it takes off on a major guitar solo that carries it for the next minute or so, with the chorus coming back in and the song ending on an acapella final line.
Sadly, this is, for me, one of those albums that suffers from midpoint syndrome, and the rest of the songs just completely fail to live up to the promise of the first four. “Paris in the spring” has a nice almost early Genesis sound about it, slow and gentle and somewhat similar to the opening of “Entangled” from “A trick of the tail”, then changes into a very Porcupine Tree style, darker and almost menacing in a way: you could nearly hear Steven Wilson singing this. Again, I marvel that the Hammond-like sound is made on guitar; I would never have guessed. These two guys can really do things with their guitars that you would not believe. Definitely the most downbeat of the tracks on the album, and it leads into the shortest, “Between today and yesterday”, which reminds me of the guitar work of mid-seventies Dan FOgelberg, with a vocal harmony that reinforces this and also recalls the likes of Gallagher and Lyle. Very acoustic and folky, upbeat but gentle, with a certain Country feel to it too. It sounds like there’s a female backing vocalist but none is mentioned so I guess not, unless if she is there she’s uncredited. But if not, then Steve Durose has a very high-pitched voice, which he may have.
The title track then is next and not surprisingly the guitars have plenty of reverb, feedback and, well, echo on them as they take the tune over, really turning it into as close to an instrumental as you can go, the music well to the fore as the vocal, sung in a high-pitched dreamy tone that puts me in mind of the more psychedelic work of the Beatles, sort of stays in the background. I hear flashes of Hogarth-era Marillion here too, and possibly the Beach Boys. But it’s the guitars that drive this song, and even though it runs for six minutes almost, on the same basic melody line, pulling in the opening phrase from “Matmos”, this tune does not seem overlong. The closer does however. Coming in at just over seven minutes, “Mary Rose” outstays its welcome by the fourth. It does however remind me very much of the closer on Marillion’s “Radiation”, a song called “A few words for the dead”. It’s not exactly similar but it is very close. A dark, sort of slide guitar opening with a low vocal before it picks up and becomes a hard rocker that tries to be something it isn’t. I have to say it just kind of bored me. Not a good closer.
TRACKLISTING
1. Matmos
2. The wheel
3. Extra vehicular
4. Where the river goes
5. Paris in the spring
6. Between today and yesterday
7. Echo Street
8. Mary Rose
To use an old footballing cliche, this is very definitely an album of two halves. The first four tracks are consistently excellent and the last four, well, aren’t. Apart from maybe “Between today and yesterday” I don’t really hear anything here that I would be interested in hearing again, whereas the first half of the album I could listen to all day. I’m not sure whether that’s a case of Amplifier running out of ideas after the first four songs, or if they just don’t appeal to me but I felt a definite shift in quality once “Where the river goes” finished. It was almost, but not quite, like I was listening to another album.
For once, the first time since I began reviewing these albums, I can see why “Echo Street” occupies the lower echelons of the list, though on the strength of the first four tracks I would have placed it a little higher. It was never going to make it to the top though, or anywhere close, and so the best I can award it really --- and this is obviously based on the first four tracks, and also the fact that I had expected to have been a lot more disappointed with it than I turned out to be --- is a reasonable
6/10.